Christian Doctrine

Thursday, February 26, 2015

I plan to spend a few days next month at a Benedictine monastery in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The suggestion was made that I give some of the monks a little talk. I think "A Philosopher Defends Monasticism" would be an appropriate title. So I have been reading up on the subject.

This morning I looked to see what Kierkegaard has to say on the topic of monks and monasteries in his late works For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! They are bound together in an attractive English translation by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Of course I did not expect old Kierkegaard to have anything good to say about the monastic ideal, but I was slightly surprised by the harshness of his tone.

I myself am highly sympathetic to the ideal. Had I been born in the Middle Ages I would have been a monk for sure. I fantasize my having been Thomas Aquinas' amanuensis and intellectual sparring partner. And although I love to read Kierkegaard and about him and have been doing so all of my philosophical life, there are two things about him that put me off. One is his anti-mysticism, which is of course connected with his anti-monasticism. The other is his anti-rationalism. But these two add up to a third, his fideism, which I also find off-putting. Well, more on all of this later. Now let's look at some quotations.

One of S.K.'s objections, perhaps his main objection, to monks and monasteries and 'popery' is straight from Luther: it is to the idea of earning merit before God by good works:

To want to build upon good works -- the more you practice them, the stricter you are with yourself, the more you merely develop the anxiety in you, and new anxiety. On this road, if a person is not completely devoid of spirit, on this road he comes to the very opposite of peace and rest for his soul, to discord and unrest. No, a person is justified solely by faith. Therefore, in God's name, to hell with the pope and all his helpers' helpers, and away with the monastery, together with all your fasting, scourging, and all the monkey antics that came into use under the name of imitation. (Judge for Yourself! 193, emphasis added)

You cannot justify yourself before God by your own efforts: "a person is justified solely and only by faith." (193) In these later works of direct communication, S. K. speaks in his own voice and is here clearly endorsing the thought of Luther on justification.

A few pages earlier S. K. speaks of the highest life:

No, it is certainly not the highest to seek a solitary hiding place in order if possible to seek God alone there. It is not the highest -- this we indeed see in the prototype [Christ]. But although it is not the highest it is nevertheless possible . . . that not a single one of us is this coddled and secularized generation would be able to do it. But it is not the highest. The highest is: unconditionally heterogeneous with the world by serving God alone, to remain in the world and in the middle of actuality before the eyes of all, to direct all attention to oneself -- for then persecution is unavoidable. This is Christian piety: renouncing everything to serve God alone, to deny oneself in order to serve God alone -- and then to have to suffer for it -- to do good and then to have to suffer for it. It is this that the prototype expresses; it is also this, to mention a mere man, that Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points our as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world. (169)

S. K. here sounds his recurrent theme of Christianity as heterogeneity to the world. The heterogeneity to the world of the monastic life, however, does not go far enough. A more radical heterogeneity is lived by one who remains in the world, not only living the doctrine, but suffering for it. No doubt that is how the Prototype lived, but he was and is God. How is such a thing possible for any mere mortal?

If true Christianity requires suffering for the doctrine, if it requires persecution and martyrdom, then true Christianity is out of reach except for those who, like present-day Christians in the Middle East, are even as we speak having their throats cut for the doctrine by radical Muslim savages as the rest of the world looks on and does nothing. In the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day (1813-1855), when Christianity was the state religion and the object of universal lip-service, true Christianity was out of reach for S. K. himself by his own teaching. The true Christian must be prepared for persecution and martyrdom, but it is difficult to see how they can be "inseparable from being a Christian in this world."

So add this persecution extremism to the off-putting factors already listed: the anti-mysticism, the anti-rationalism, and the extreme fideism.

But what a prodigiously prolific writer he was! What a genius, and what a fascinating specimen of humanity.

Thank you for continuing to examine the important topic of "daily bread." I don't know of any other philosophy blog writer who combines depth, significance, and clarity like you do!

I agree that spiritual needs are primary, that our world is a vale of soul-making, and that there need not be a disjunction between the spiritual and physical aspects of human nature. Passages such as Mt. 4:4, Jn. 4:10-14, Jn. 6:35, Prov. 4:7 and 16:16, and 2 Peter 1:4-15 seem to emphasize spiritual needs over material needs. Jn. 4:10-14 is particularly interesting.

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?" Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (Jn. 4:10-14)

Notice that Jesus states a counterfactual. The woman interprets the statement in material terms. Jesus responds by contrasting the transience of material water with the permanence of spiritual water.

Jesus goes on to say:

"A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth." (verses 23 and 24) Meanwhile his disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." (verses 31 and 32)

These passages seem to prioritize spiritual development, and to support your spiritual interpretation of "daily bread."

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

[1] The word generally translated “daily” is indeed an unusual one – epiousios, which is apparently found nowhere else in scripture or anywhere in Greek literature. [2] Even so, the idea that this is spiritual and not physical bread is very much a minority theory, one that’s generally not accepted by contemporary translators. [3] Maybe it isn’t impossible, but feeling compelled to accept such an interpretation to “purify” prayer seems mistaken to me. We are embodied beings, not angels, and God’s creation of the physical world was a good thing and not a Manichean mess to be overcome. Asking God to supply not only our spiritual needs but our physical needs as well seems appropriate. (If God cares about sparrows and the lilies of the field, it isn’t too much trouble for him to be concerned for our general physical well-being as well.) Moreover, the act of praying for our daily “bread” is a way of acknowledging that even in that respect we are dependent on God. The God of the Bible is not the hands-off god of Plato, Aristotle, and the deists. God is not like the petty deities of the Greek pantheon, but to divest the biblical God of the sort of personal care and love expressed in books like Hosea and in passages like Luke 13:34 and good old John 3:16 misses something important – something literally crucial. Of course, my objections here don’t mean that we should view God as a cosmic ATM. That would be idolatrous. Even so, the possibility of going too far in one direction doesn’t mean that one can’t also go too far in the opposite direction as well.

My response:

Ad [1]. Agreed. As I wrote a few years back:

The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so caveat lector!)

Ad [2]. Dennis may be right about this. I don't know. But if I'm right, then my being in the minority, the default position for a maverick, is no problem at all.

Ad [3]. Agreed, we are embodied beings, not angels. (It may even be that we are essentially embodied, or if not essentially embodied, then incapable of a complete existence without a body.) But while we are not angels, we are not mere animals either. The main point for present purposes, however, is simply that, as physically embodied beings, we need food and water and other material things for our maintenance if we wish to continue as physically embodied beings.

We are further agreed that matter is not evil, and Manicheanism is out. A physical universe created by a good God is itself (derivatively) good. (Of course, there are deep and vexing questions that lurk below the surface. For example, if ens et bonum convertuntur, then evil is privatio boni, and that raises some serious questions.)

So Dennis and I agree on two key points: that (i) we are embodied (and thus in need of ongoing material sustenance) and that (ii) being embodied is not an evil condition as such. How is it supposed to follow from these two premises that it is appropriate to ask God to supply our physical needs, needs that we have the power to supply for ourselves?

It doesn't follow. We can and must supply our physical needs as best we can by our own efforts. That is our job, not God's. God has a role to play, but it concerns our spiritual development.

Here is my take on the Christian message. We are here below to achieve spiritual individuation. Spiritual individuation, unlike physical individuation, is a task, not a given. It is a task we freely undertake or fail to undertake. We are here to spiritualize ourselves, to actualize ourselves as spiritual individuals. This is a process of theosis, of becoming god-like. God is the Absolute Individual. Our task is to become genuine spiritual individuals by participating in the divine Individuality. This material world is a vale of soul-making (John Keats), a place where we either work at this spiritual individuation or fail to do so. In this life we are always only 'on the road,' in statu viae. We are not here to enjoy material goods as ends in themselves as if this world were our final destination.

In this transient life we must work at supplying our material needs as best we can by our own individual and collective human efforts, not by praying for miracles. I am not saying that miracles are impossible. And I am not saying that anyone who, in extremis, a theist in a foxhole, for example, cries out to God for material assistance is doing something morally wrong. In my original entry I conceded that not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable, and that some of it simply reflects, excusably, our misery and indigence. My point is that, insofar as we can (individually and collectively) do for ourselves we must do for ourselves, relying on God not for our material needs (except insofar as he created the physical universe within which alone material needs can be felt and met) but for our spiritual needs.

And so I do not see that Monokroussos has given me good reason to alter my interpretation:

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day. And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it? Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian. The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance.

It is also worth noting that the materialist interpretation of the daily bread petition plays right into the hands of religion's detractors who see religion as a childish and superstitious thing. There is also this to consider: are there any well-documented cases of people who were miraculously supplied with physical food after they prayed for it? But there are countless cases, some in my own direct experience, in which spiritual assistance was provided as a result of prayer.

Friday, February 20, 2015

For Dave Bagwill, who posed some questions in the near vicinity of the ones I will be addressing. This is a heavily revised version of a 2011 post. The MavPhil doctrine of abrogation is in effect. This is a hairy topic; expect a hard slog. If you prefer a 'leiter' read, a certain gossip site suggests itself.

..............

One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?

Our question, then, is precisely this: Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods? (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction of essential tenets, and without addition of private opinions.) Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic. So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, and a monotheistic God exists, then one is worshipping a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.

1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God. So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.' And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.' From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods. So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words. We must advance to concepts.

2. We need to distinguish between our word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God. God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition and religious feelings such as the Kreatur-Gefuehl that Rudolf Otto speaks of, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God. Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap. The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:

a. There is exactly one God.b. God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.c. God is transcendent: he is radically different from everything distinct from himself.d. God is good.

Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods. But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths. The crux of the matter is the cross.

So while the God-concepts overlap, they are different concepts. (The overlap is partial, not complete.) And let's not forget that God is not, and cannot be, a concept (as I am using 'concept'). No concept is worship-worthy or anyone's highest good. No concept created the world. Whether or not God exists, it is a conceptual truth that God cannot be a concept. For the concept of God contains the subconcept, being that exists apart from any finite mind. It is built into the very concept of God that God cannot be a concept.

It is clear then, that what the Christian and the Muslim worship or purport to worship cannot be that which is common to their respective God-conceptions, for what is common its itself a concept.

We could say that if God exists, then God is the object of our God-concept or the referent of our God-concept, but also the referent of the word 'God.'

3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:

V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

4. It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of adescription associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take. The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated with 'God.' The reference relation is one of satisfaction. A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t. Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune. So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers to the Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.) For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or else the subconcept unitarian, then the reference cannot be to the same entity.

A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear. Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass. She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!" Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but mineral water instead. Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?

Argumentative Nancy, who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne. The man is drinking mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage. Nothing satisfies your definite description. There is no one man we both admire. Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does."

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description. Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case. Both women see the man in the corner. But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience. We don't see God in this life. Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush. The man in the corner that the women see and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.

Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

5. My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah' and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God. Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champage and not drinking champagne at the same time.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

One might propose a causal theory of names.

The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)

As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that aspeaker's use of a name be causally connected (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain)) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use the term, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.

A particular use of a name is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'YHWH' to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)

So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divinenames with the consequences mentioned in (i) above. If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later) to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question. It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language.

Friday, February 13, 2015

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In many of its forms it borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery. Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable. Some of it simply reflects, excusably, our misery and indigence. (Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?) But much of it is. What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits. In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence. So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.' A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread.

But this morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian. The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical. 'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30) What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day. On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Not by physical bread, but by meta-physical bread.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day. And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it? Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian. The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance.

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me. Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically? Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit." Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor? "Man has a higher origin." 'Higher' is metaphorical. "Man is made by God in his image and likeness." Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract. I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense. But I got nowhere as could have been expected: anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction. It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation.

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

___________________

* For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without 'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

Monday, February 09, 2015

A review by Thomas F. Madden of Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Some excerpts (bolding added):

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.

[. . .]

St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.

[. . .]

And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”

In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.

Sunday, February 08, 2015

We Americans are forward-looking people, 'progressives' if you will. ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford.) Muslims, by contrast, live in the past where they nurture centuries-old grievances. This is part of the explanation of the inanition of their culture and the misery of their lands, which fact is part of the explanation of why they won't stay where they are but insist on infiltrating the West. Exercised as they remain over the Crusades, lo these many centuries later, it behooves us to inform ourselves of the historical facts. This is especially important in light of President Obama's recent foolish, unserious, and mendacious comments.

Herewith, then, a piece from someone who knows what he is talking about. I copied it from this location.

Jihad vs. Crusade

Bernard Lewis/Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28, 2001

U.S. President George W. Bush's use of the term "crusade" in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of "a war for the cross," and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, "crusade" almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.

Yet "crusade" still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism -- aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often-atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad -- a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.

The real countercrusade began when the crusaders -- very foolishly -- began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Muhammad was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called "Franks" or "infidels." The words "Crusade" and "crusader" simply do not occur.

They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as "crusaders" and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for "the petty state of the Jews" come third.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word "jihad" is striving, and its common use derives from the Quranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike "crusade," it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.

Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: "For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." In view of this, "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

Muhammad himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe -- the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian reconquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.

In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.

Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.

Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm noncombatants, women and children, "unless they attack you first." Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ -- some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.

What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.

---

Mr. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

I have been, and will continue, discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this: How can three things be one thing? With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man? These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of ordinary experience. We seek intelligibility by an objective route. We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one. See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine. A marvellous quotation.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts. The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question. The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus -- but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man though the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity -- a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata -- it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance.4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.

I expected Tim to question (4), but he instead questioned (5). That turned the dialectic away from the general-ontological Aristotelian framework, which I was claiming does not allow the coherent conceivability of the Chalcedonian formulation, toward the exact sense of the Chalcedonian theological doctrine of the Incarnation.

As I see it, we are now discussing the following question. Is it metaphysically possible that the individual human being who is the Son of God -- and is thus identical to the Second Person of the Trinity -- exist as an individual human being but without being the Son of God? I thought I was being orthodox in returning a negative answer. As I understand it, the individual human being who is the Son of God in the actual world, our world, is the Son of God in every possible world in which he exists. This is equivalent to saying that Jesus of Nazareth is essentially (as opposed to accidentally) the Son of God. (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists.)

If I understand what Tim Pawl is saying, his view is that there are possible worlds in which Jesus of Nazareth exists but is not the Son of God. So the issue between us is as follows:

BV: Every metaphysically possible world in which Jesus exists is a world in which he is identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

TP: Some metaphysically possible worlds in which Jesus exists are worlds in which he is not identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

I do think that there is a merely possible world in which CHN [Christ's human nature] exists as unassumed. In such a world, it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit. And so it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit with a rational nature. So it is a person in that world, [call it W] even though it is not a person in this world [call it A].

I am afraid I find this incoherent. If Jesus is (identical to) the Son of God, then Jesus is (identically) the Son of God in every world in which he exists. To spell out the argument:

1. 'Jesus' and 'Son' are Kripkean rigid designators: they designate the same item in every possible world in which that item exists.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

For Shaun Deegan, who 'inspired' a sloppy prototype of the following argument hashed out over Sunday breakfast at a Mesa, Arizona hash house.

................

The Question

More precisely: is it coherently conceivable that one person, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, have both an individual divine nature and an individual human nature? (A person, as per Boethius, is an individual substance of a rational nature.)

This is not the same as the question: Is the Incarnation coherently conceivable? For my concern is whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within a broadly Aristotelian ontological framework. My answer: I don't think so. My answer leaves open the question whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within some other ontological framework.

The Argument

1. If N is a nature of substance s, then s cannot exist without having N. Natures are essential to the things that have them. In possible worlds jargon: If N is a nature of s, then in every possible world in which s exists, s has N. (The modality in play here is broadly logical or metaphysical.)

2. The Logos L is a necessary being: L exists in every possible world.

3. The Logos has the individual divine nature DN.

4. The Logos has the individual divine nature in every possible world. (from 1, 2, 3)

But which one? Let's examine the premises. No classical Trinitarian theist could reject (2) or (3). And no believer in the Incarnation could reject (5). No classical theist could reject (8) given that God might have refrained from creating a natural universe with human beings. So it seems that someone who adheres to each of these theological commitments must reject (1), which is a plank in the Aristotelian platform.

Or, if you adhere to Aristotelian principles, it seems you must abandon the orthodox Chalcedonian line on the Incarnation.

Friday, November 07, 2014

1. What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?

2. Is there any non-theological basis for this distinction?

3. If the answer to (2) is negative, is the addition of suppposita to one's Aristotelian ontology a case of legitimate metaphysical revision or a case of an ad hoc theoretical patch job? According to Marilyn McCord Adams, "Metaphysical revision differs from ad hoc theoretical patching insofar as it attempts to make the new data systematically unsurprising in a wider theoretical context." ("Substance and Supposits," p. 40)

The First Question

By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity. Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities. Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the classical mereological sum of the two is not a substance.

Now what is a supposit? Experts in medieval philosophy -- and I am not one of them, nota bene -- sometimes write as if there is no distinction between a substance and a supposit. Thus Richard Cross: "Basically a supposit is a complete being that is neither instantiated or exemplified, nor inherent in another." ("Relations, Universals, and the Abuse of Tropes," PAS 79, 2005, p. 53.) And Marilyn McCord Adams speaks of Socrates and Plato as "substance individuals" and then puts "hypostases or supposits" in apposition to the first phrase. (PAS 79, 2005, p. 15)

My first question, then, is: Is there any more-than-verbal difference between a substance and a supposit, and if so, what is it?

One answer that suggests itself is that, while every substance has a supposit, some substances have alien supposits. That is, some substances are their own supposits, while others are not their own supposits, but have alien supposits. (I take the phrase 'alien supposit' from Adams, p. 31 et passim.) A substance has an alien supposit if and only if it is not its own supposit. I understand Aristotle to maintain or at least be committed to the proposition that every (primary) substance is essentially its own supposit. (I rather doubt that the Stagirite ever raised the question of alien supposition.) If so, then no substance is possibly such as to have an alien supposit. If alien supposition is metaphysically or broadly logically possible, however, then we have a ground for a more-than-terminological distinction between substances and supposits. Whether the converse of this conditional holds is a further question. For it may be that there is a ground for the distinction even if alien supposition is not possible.

Incarnation, Trinity, and the separated soul's survival between death and resurrection are theological examples of alien supposition. Whether there are non-theological examples is a further, and very important question, one the answer to which has consequences for questions (2) and (3) above.

The Incarnation is an example of alien supposition as I will now try to explain.

The orthodox view is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the NT, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and and animal body. But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)

b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)

c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). For if there are two primary substances of a rational nature, the Word and Christ, then there are two persons each with his own individualized nature, contra Chalcedonian orthodoxy, according to whch there is exactly one person in two natures. The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d), the very natural Aristotelian assumption that every substance is its own supposit. One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.

If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not itself a supposit.

Let me now say a bit about the Trinity. Here too a problem looms that can be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad.

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)

f. The individualized nature of God is a primary substance of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

Again, the tetrad is inconsistent, and again the solution is to reject (d) by saying that, while the individualized divine nature is a primary substance, it is not one that supposits itself: it has three alien supposits, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The Son is thus the alien supposit of both God's divine nature and Christ's human nature.

My first question concerned the difference between a substance and supposit. My tentative answer is that while only substances can be supposits, there are substances that are not their own supposits nor are they supposits for anything else, an example being the individualized human nature of Christ.

Is there a non-theological basis for the distinction? if not, then the suspicion arises that the distinction is purely ad hoc, crafted to save tenets of orthodox Christian theology. But this is a question for another occasion.

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

For Dave Bagwill, who is trying to understand the Chalcedonian definition.

................

Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:

1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity.2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily.3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.

Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, according to which, roughly, if two things are identical, then they share all properties, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?

(The stylistically elegant ‘while’ may be replaced for truth-functional purposes with the logician's ampersand.) Now one might object that reduplicative formulations are not helpful unto salvation from inconsistency since in the crucial cases they entail outright contradictions. They merely hide and postpone the difficulty. Thus, given that being a Person of the Trinity entails existing necessarily, and being a human animal entails existing contingently, (4) entails

5. Jesus exists necessarily & Jesus does not exist necessarily.

And that is a plain contradiction. But this assumes that reduplicative constructions need not be taken with full ontological seriousness as requiring reduplicative truth-makers. It assumes that what we say with reduplicatives can be said without them, and that, out in the world, there is nothing that corresponds to them, or at least that we have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to reduplicative entities, qua-entities, one might call them. That assumption now needs to be examined. Suppose we parse (4) as

where the hyphenated expressions function as nouns, qua-nouns (to give them a name) that denote qua-entities. It is easy to see that (6) avoids contradiction for the simple reason that the two qua-entities are non-identical. But what is non-identical may nonetheless be the same if we have a principled way of distinguishing between identity and sameness. (Hector-Neri Castaneda is one philosopher who distinguishes between identity and a number of sameness relations.) Essentially what I have just done is made a distinction in respects while taking respects with full ontological seriousness. This sort of move is nothing new. Consider a cognate case.

Suppose I have a red boat that I paint blue. Then we can say that there are distinct times, t1 and t2, such that b is red at t1 and blue at t2. That can be formulated as a reduplicative: b qua existing at t1 is red and b qua existing at t2 is blue. One could take that as just a funny way of talking, or one could take it as a perspicuous representation of the ontological structure of the world. Suppose the latter. Then, adding hyphens, one could take oneself to be ontologically committed to temporal parts, which are a species of qua-entity. Thus b-at-t1 is a temporal part that is distinct from b-at-t2. These temporal parts are distinct since they differ property-wise: one is red the other blue. Nevertheless, they are the same in that they are parts of the same whole, the temporally extended boat.

The conceptual move we are making here is analogous to the move we make when we say that a ball is green in its northern hemisphere and red in its southern hemisphere in order to defuse the apparent contradiction of saying that it is red and green at the same time. Here different spatial parts have different properties, whereas in the boat example, different temporal parts have different properties.

Can we apply this to the Incarnation and say that Jesus-qua-God is F (immortal, impassible, necessarily existent, etc.) while Jesus-qua-man is not F? That would avoid the contradiction while upholding such obvious truths as that divinity entails immortality while humanity entails mortality. We could then say, borrowing a term from the late Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991), that Jesus-qua-God is consubstantiated with Jesus-qua-man. (Hector the atheist is now rolling around in his grave.) The two are the same, contingently the same. They are ontological parts of the same substance, and are, in that sense, consubstantiated. Jesus is God the Son where ‘is’ expresses a contingent sameness relation, rather than strict identity (which is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Necessity of Identity).

The idea is that God the Son and Jesus are, or are analogous to, ontological parts of one and the same whole. This is an admittedly bizarre idea, and probably cannot be made to work. But it is useful to canvass all theoretical possibilities.

Monday, November 03, 2014

The Creed of Chalcedon (A.D 451) set forth the following dogma, among others: (my emphasis)

".. one and the same Christ ....to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son . . ."

The deliberate language of 'two natures' in 'one Person' is really remarkable. When you find some time, can you give me a bit of direction in determining, first - what it is for a person to 'have a human nature' and second - depending on that answer, is there any way to explain the concept of a person having two 'natures'? I even find the statement that human persons have both an 'animal nature' and a 'human nature' troublesome. There is a category mistake that I sense but cannot yet explain.

The reader poses three questions. After answering them, I will pose a fourth question that the reader doesn't explicitly ask.

Q1. How can a human person have both an animal nature and a human nature? I don't see much of a difficulty here. If man is a rational animal (Aristotle), then Socrates, in virtue of being human, is an animal. Now he is both animal and human essentially as opposed to accidentally. Thus Socrates could not have existed without being an animal: he could not have been inanimate, say a statue or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. And he could not have existed without being human: he could not have been nonhuman like a cat or a jelly fish. Whether or not every essential feature of a thing is part of its nature, every nature is essential to a thing that has it. So I see no problem in saying that Socrates has both an animal nature and human nature, where the latter includes the former, though not conversely. Nature N1 includes nature N2 just in case it is impossible that something have N1 but not have N2.

Q2. How can a person have two natures? This is answered above. Humanity and animality are distinct -- the first includes the second, but not conversely -- but there is nothing to prevent one and the same individual substance from having both of them.

Q3. What is it for a person to have a human nature? On the Boethian definition, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. So the question might be: How can a rational individual -- an individual being that has the capacity to reason -- also be human? Well, I don't see much difficulty here. Not every person is a human being, but every human being is a person. So humanity includes personhood.

Q4. How can one and the same person have two seemingly incompatible natures? I suspect that this is the question the reader really wants to pose. There is no obvious problem about one person having two natures if they are logically compatible as they are if one includes the other. The problem is that while humanity includes animality, humanity appears to exclude divinity. Among the marks of humanity: animality, mortality, mutability, passibility; among the marks of divinity: spirituality (non-animality), immortality, immutability, impassibility.

According to Chalcedon, one and the same person is both fully human and fully divine. Now, necessarily, anything human is passible, thus capable of suffering. But, necessarily, nothing divine is passible; hence nothing divine is capable of suffering. So if one and the same person is both human and divine, then one and the same person is both capable of suffering and not capable of suffering. This is a contradiction. Herein lies the difficulty.

The reader needs to tell me whether this is the problem that is exercising him. (Note that the problem can be developed using attributes other than passibility.)

I wonder whether the reader would be satisfied with the following strategy and the following analogy. Christ qua human is capable of suffering, but Christ qua divine is not. This removes the contradiction. Analogy: Obama qua president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but Obama qua citizen is not.

Monday, October 20, 2014

I have been accused, on a forum, of being a second-class Christian because I have stated that I cannot understand Trinitarian doctrine [as presented in the Athanasian creed]. I have stated that I do accept the Apostles' Creed, but that is not seemingly good enough. So I have asked for clarification from forumites as to why they believe not only that the doctrine is true, but that believing it is a must for 'full fellowship'.

My reader goes on to say that the responses of his fellow forum members were unsatisfactory. His main question is: "What practical difference does a belief or non-belief in the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity make?" My reader accepts and tries to live by the the Apostles' Creed, but doesn't understand the Athanasian Creed. As well as he might not, given the logical difficulties of the doctrine.

To answer the reader's question: no practical difference to speak of.

The underlying problem, as it seems to me, is that of the relative importance of doctrine and practice. In every religion there is both. Are they of equal importance? Or is one more important that the other? I suggest that, while both are important,

1. Practice is more important than doctrine;

2. Theological doctrines are necessary makeshifts, feeble human attempts at conceptualizing what by its very nature must remain in the main beyond the human conceptual horizon in this life;

3. Doctrinal disputes can and often do lead to acrimonious controversies that are the exact opposite of conducive unto salvation.

The two central precepts of Christianity are: Love God with your whole heart, whole soul, and whole mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. What exactly is enjoined by these two absolutely central precepts may be reasonably discussed, and ought to be. But we know more or less what they mean and require of us. And we know more or less what would be incompatible with their practical realization.

To love God is not to love one's ideas about God. For then one is loving, not God, but products of one's own ego. A theologian in love with his own pet formulations is arguably a high-level idolater. And analogously for the doctrinal formulations of one's church or sect.

And it would seem that bitter, rationally unresolvable dispute about exceedingly abstruse questions is not at all conducive to love of neighbor, and is in fact in many cases incompatible with such love. Consider some such theological nicety as the filioque clause. The question is whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son -- filioque means 'and the Son' -- or from the Father directly. Quite apart from the question of what practical difference this could make in the life of a believer, does the question have a sense clear enough to permit a rational solution?

The Athanasian Creed, quite unlike the Apostles' Creed, makes subscription to verbally precise Trinitarian and Christological doctrines a necessary condition of salvation. Their verbal precision, however, has not prevented centuries of debate as to their exact meaning and coherence. To hurl an anathema at anyone who fails to accept them on pain of damnation strikes me as nothing more than an expression of the human-all-too-human need for doxastic security. People have a terribly strong need to be secure in their beliefs even when the beliefs in question are plainly open to serious doubt.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

People can and ought to be judged by the company they keep, the company they keep away from, and those who attack them.

Addendum (6/23):

S. N. counters thusly:

For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' (Luke 7.33-4)

God incarnate can safely consort with gluttons and drunkards and the lying agents of the Infernal Revenue Service, but mortal man cannot. So one who does so consort ought to be judged by the company he keeps. The judgment might be along the following lines, "You are morally weak, and you know you are; and yet you enter the near occasion of sin?"

This leads to a question about "Judge not lest ye be judged." How is this NT verse at Matthew 7, 1-5 to be interpreted? Is it to be read as implying the categorical imperative, "Thou shalt not judge others morally"? Or is it to be interpreted as a merely hypothetical imperative, "You may judge others morally, but only if you are prepared to be judged morally in turn and either condemned or exonerated as the case may be"?

The first reading is not plausible. For one thing, one cannot detach the antecedent or the consequent of a conditional in the way one can detach the conjunct of a conjunction. Compare 'If you don't want to be judged by others, don't judge them' with 'You don't want to be judged by others and you don't want others to judge you.' The categorical imperative 'Don't judge them' does not follow from the first. The declarative ' You don't want others to judge you' does follow from the second.

But now a third reading suggests itself to me, one that in a sense combines the categorical and the hypothetical, to wit, "You may judge others morally, but only if you are prepared to be judged morally and condemned by God, since no man is justified before God." This is tantamount to a categorical prohibition on judging.

I suspect the third reading is the correct one in the context of Christian teaching as a whole. But I'm no theologian.

Friday, April 18, 2014

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

J. P. Moreland is against it. Me too. More generally, I oppose any amalgamation of classical theism and materialism about the mind. (See my "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 160-180.) Here are some excerpts from Moreland's piece:

Christianity is a dualist, interactionist religion in this sense: God, angels/demons, and the souls of men and beasts are immaterial substances that can causally interact with the world. Specifically, human persons are (or have) souls that are spiritual substances that ground personal identity in a disembodied intermediate state between death and final resurrection . . . .

[. . .]

In my view, Christian physicalism involves a politically correct revision of the biblical text that fails to be convincing . . . .

[. . .]

The irrelevance of neuroscience also becomes evident when we consider the recent best seller Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. Regardless of one’s view of the credibility of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in general, or of Alexander’s in particular, one thing is clear. Before whatever it was that happened to him (and I believe his NDE was real but no not agree with his interpretation of some of what happened to him), Alexander believed the (allegedly) standard neuroscientific view that specific regions of the brain generate and possess specific states of conscious. But after his NDE, Alexander came to believe that it is the soul that possesses consciousness, not the brain, and the various mental states of the soul are in two-way causal interaction with specific regions of the brain. Here’s the point: His change in viewpoint was a change in metaphysics that did not require him to reject or alter a single neuroscientific fact. Dualism and physicalism are empirically equivalent views consistent with all and only the same scientific data. Thus, the authority of science cannot be appropriated to provide any grounds whatsoever for favoring one view over another.

I'm with J.P on the irrelevance of neuroscience to the philosophy of mind, and vice versa, but with three minor exceptions that I explain in the third article cited below.

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.

The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

Friday, September 27, 2013

. . . there has been a strain in Protestantism, with its immense reverence for Scripture, to write of Holy Scripture itself as the original [propositional] revelation; what was given by God was the Bible. But that surely fits very badly with other things that those same Protestants wish to say: for example that there were Christians in the first four centuries AD. For the books of the New Testament were not written down until from twenty to seventy years after Christ taught on Earth, and were only put together and recognized as a New Testament in final form in the fourth century AD. If the books themselves were the revelation, how could there be Chrsitians when there were no books? [Footnote 6 not reproduced: it quotes Iraneus and Papias as quoted by Eusebius.] Holy Scripture must be regarded by Protestants as it is by Catholics, as no more than a true record of a revelation which existed before it.

Friday, June 28, 2013

London Karl points us to this interview, some of which I reproduce here:

It would be silly, foolish, to object to the Church on the grounds that it is "traditionalist". The whole strength of the Church is that it is faithful to its tradition - otherwise, what is the Church for? If the Church is going to become a political party which merely adapts its beliefs to changing opinions, it can be safely dismissed altogether, because there are political parties doing such things. If the Church is there to sanctify and bless in advance every change in intellectual and moral fashion in our civilisation, then again - what is the Church for? The Church is strong because it has a traditional teaching, a spiritual kernel, which it considers its immutable essence. It cannot just yield to any pressure from people who think that whatever is in fashion at the present moment should immediately be adopted by the Church as its own teaching, whether in the field of political ideas or of daily life.

I think the Church is not only right in keeping its historically shaped, traditional identity. Its very role, its very mission on earth would become unclear if it did not do that. And so I would not be afraid at all, and I would not take it as an insult, that critics describe the Church as traditionalist or conservative.

There must be forces of conservatism in society, in spiritual life, by which I mean the forces of conservation. Without such forces, the entire fabric of society would fall apart.

[. . .]

In my view, there is no way in which Marxist teaching could be reconciled with Christianity. Marxism is anti-Christian, not contingently, not by accident, but in its very core. You cannot reconcile it.

There is no Christianity where no distinction is made between temporal and eternal values. There is no Christianity where [the word 'where' is wrong; should be UNLESS] one accepts that all earthly values, however important, however crucial to human life, are nevertheless secondary. What the Church is about essentially is the salvation of human souls, and the human soul is never reducible to social conditions.

There is an absolute value in the human person. The Church believes that the world - the social world, the physical world - is merely an expression of the divine, and as such it can only have instrumental or secondary value. Without this, there is no point in speaking about Christianity.

Kolakowski is absolutely right about this. His is an exceedingly penetrating mind. I recommend his work. See my Kolakowski category.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

I would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would. Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career, not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, not the Luciferian pride of a Russell or a Sartre or a Hitchens, not the opposition of a wife: mine is a good old-fashioned Catholic girl who attends mass on Sundays, ministers to the sick, and embodies the old-time virtues.

Philosophical and theological questions and doubts are the main impediments to my return.

. . . in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized. There is a famous passage in Caesar’s De bello Gallico where he explains why the Belgae tribe were such good soldiers. He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes ad effeminandos animos, to the effeminizing of their spirits.

[. . .]

In its Novus Ordo form . . . the Liturgy has been devirilized. One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both vir and homo mean “man”, but it is vir alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for “husband”. The Aeneid begins with the famous words: arma virumque cano. (“ I sing of arms and the man-hero.”) What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.

But not only the Liturgy has been devirilized; the priests have been too. The priests of my youth were manly men. But this soon changed in ways that are well known.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.

Still, religion has its immanent life-enhancing role to play, whether true or false, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it will ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Friday, March 29, 2013

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Apparently, there are some atheists who are adopting Lenten-type practices without abandoning their atheist beliefs. This ought to be cautiously applauded: we all can profit morally from a bit of voluntary abstinence. One cannot live well without (moderate) asceticism. (See William James on Self-Denial.) Better self-controlled atheists than atheists 'gone wild.'

But I would urge these atheists to go further and practice doxastic abstinence. Without rejecting your atheist beliefs, put them within brackets for the Lenten period. Practice epoché with respect to them, that is, withhold intellectual assent. That is not to doubt them or disbelieve them, but simply to make no use of them. Leave them alone for a time. In the strict sense epoché goes beyond even suspension of judgment. If I suspend judgment with respect to a propositional content, I neither affirm it, deny it, doubt it, nor even just entertain it. For if I do any of those things I admit that it has a coherent sense. In epoché, however, I leave it open whether the content has a coherent sense. Epoché is the ultimate in doxastic disengagement. Practicing total doxastic abstinence, I totally disengage from those propositions that ignite often acrimonious disagreement.

You can always go back to your atheist beliefs. Another excellent form of self-denial for atheists and religionists alike is to abstain from all theological controversies and polemics from time to time. One could call it a 'belief fast.' I hope we can all agree that being just is better than developing a theory of justice. And if discussing the Trinity only makes you angry and combative, then it might be best to drop theology and cultivate piety.

But while atheists can profit from voluntary self-denial, bringing such practices under the Lent umbrella makes little sense. Will the period of self-denial go from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday? Why tie it to these dates freighted as they are with Christian metaphysics? When a Christian reminds himself on Ash Wednesday that he is dust and shall return to dust, the whole point of that memento mori is situated within the context of the hope for and promise of eternal life. Christian mortalism is toto caelo different from atheist mortalism. And what the Christian celebrates on Easter Sunday is precisely the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ by the power of God and the hope that death will be conquered eventually for all. No atheist believes that.

In the final analysis, Lent secularized is no longer Lent. Atheists ought to exercise their imaginations and come up with a secular analog free of Chistian trappings.

Atheists ought also to worry that if they take up Christian practices, the beliefs may follow . . . .

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Bill O'Reilly does a lot of good, but he made a fool of himself last night on his O'Reilly Factor. It was painful to watch. In the course of a heated exchange with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O'Reilly claimed that Christianity is not a religion, but a philosophy. At first I thought I had misheard, but Mr. Bill repeated the ridiculous assertion.

And yet O'Reilly was right to oppose the extremism of Silverman and the zealots who seek to remove every vestige of religion from the public square, though they seem to be rather less zealous when it comes to the 'religion of peace.'

O'Reilly's bizarre assertion shows that he has no understanding of the differences among philosophy, religion, and Christianity. For part of my views on the differences between philosophy and religion, see here. There is room for disagreement on the exact definition of 'religion,' but if anything is clear, it is that Christianity is a religion. O'Reilly only dug his hole deeper when he claimed that while Christianity is a philosophy, Methodism is a religion!

I am reminded of the inarticulate George W. Bush. He once claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. That silly assertion showed that Bush understood neither philosophy nor Jesus. Jesus claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth. "I am the way, the truth, and the life . . . ." That is a claim that no philosopher qua philosopher can make. A philosopher is a mere seeker of truth, not a possessor of it, let alone truth's very incarnation. A philosopher is a person who is ignorant, knows that he is, and seeks to remedy his deficiency.

Neither God nor Christ are philosophers. And we can thank God for that!

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

I've continued to think on one of our old disagreements, the one about religion and zealotry, and I'd like to continue the discussion. Previously, I'd put forward the argument attempting to show that religious belief is rationally unacceptable. Now, I'm thinking it might be profitable to repackage the argument for a more modest conclusion. I want to say something like, "Given other epistemic commitments that I have and, on reflection, find myself unable to give up, I find that I am rationally unable to accept religious belief of the sort in question." Since I take these commitments to be closely related to the conservative disposition which you and I share, perhaps you will find that you, too are committed to abandoning religious belief." This is, to use a phrase from Robert Nozick, non-coercive philosophy, and I am growing increasingly inclined to think that herein all real persuasion lies.

BV: I suggest we divide persuasion into nonrational and rational, and then subdivide rational persuasion into coercive and noncoercive. Noncoercive rational persuasion, I take it, would be rational persuasion that makes use only of propositions already accepted by the person to be persuaded in an attempt to get him to accept a proposition to which he is logically committed by what he already accepts but does not yet accept. I agree that in the vast majority of cases only noncoercive rational persuasion has a chance at success.

Let me now re-frame the argument that I have presented earlier, with the hope that I can improve on my earlier formulations. When I was a soldier in Afghanistan, I attended a ceremony for a fallen comrade. Nobody I knew. In main sermon, the chaplain said, "Sgt. So-and-so got a big promotion that day," referring to the day an IED [improvised explosive device] ended the life of this unfortunate soldier. His reasoning is that now this soldier was enjoying the loving embrace of Jesus. Whatever suffering this caused him or his family is comparatively small.

I found the chaplain's speech off-putting because his account robbed this soldier's death of its tragedy. He went well beyond consoling the survivors to telling us that we should be positively happy that this event occurred. What disturbed me more, though, is that the chaplain arrived at this conclusion very reasonably from very widely held set of religious beliefs. If one believes, as a majority of the people of the world do, that an eternity of happiness of a much higher grade than any that exists on earth awaits the righteous after death, then one is left to draw this, and other unpalatable conclusions. For instance, if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it.

I too am put off by the chaplain's speech but for a different reason. What I find offensive is his presumption to know that the unfortunate soldier is now in a far better state. No one can legitimately claim to know that God exists, or that we survive our bodily deaths as individuals, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that a given person is in heaven as opposed to the other place, etc. (Nor can one legitimately claim to know the negations of any of these propositions.) People can and do believe these things, and some have good reasons for (some of) their beliefs. Since no one can know about these things, the chaplain had no right to offer the kind of ringing assurance he offered or to make the claim that one should be positively happy that the soldier was blown to bits.

So I would say that the chaplain was doubly presumptuous. He presumed to know what no one can know, and he presumed to make a comforting assurance that he was not entitled to make. But had he said something tentative and in keeping with our actual doxastic predicament, then I wouldn't have been offended. Suppose he had said this: "Our faith teaches us that death is not the end and that this life is but a prelude to a better life to come. We hope and pray that Sgt So-and-So is now sharing in that higher life." I would not be put off by such a speech. Consolation without presumption.

What you are offended by is something different, the very content of the Christian message. But suppose it is true. Then there is nothing ultimately "tragic" about the soldier's death. (I also think you are misusing 'tragic.' Was hubris displayed by the soldier prior to his death?) He has left this vale of tears and has gone to a better 'place.' You see, if Christianity is true, then death does not have the 'sting' that it has for an atheist (assuming the atheist values life in this world). Are you then just assuming that Christianity is false? If it is false, then Nietzsche is right and it is a slander upon this life, the only life there is. But is it false? You can't just assume that it is.

Distinguish the question whether Christianity is true from the question whether it can be known to be true (by anyone here below). I claim that it cannot be known to be true, using 'know' in a strict and intellectually responsible way.

Now one of the "unpalatable consequences" you mention is this: "if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it." But this is not a consequence of Christian belief, but at best a consequence of the fanatical and dogmatic belief that one knows that Christianity is true. Suppose I did know that Christianity -- or rather some fire-and- brimstone variant of Christianity-- is true, then why wouldn't I be justified in torturing someone until he accepts the saving truth, the truth without which he will spend all eternity in hell? What's worse, a day of torture or an eternity of it? Besides, if I really care about you, wouldn't I want you to have an eternity of bliss?

What you are giving us, I think, is an argument against religious fanaticism, not an argument against religion. Religion is a matter of faith, not knowledge. More precisely, genuine religion is a matter of a faith that understands that it is faith and not knowledge. Once that is understood your "unpalatable consequences" do not ensue. For if I understand that my faith transcends what I can legitimately claim to know, then this understanding will prevent me from torturing someone into acceptance of my creed. For surely it is clearer that one ought not torture people into the acceptance of metaphysical propositions than that said propositions are true.

Now, as our previous discussions have shown, one is not compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook, as I have done, because of these considerations. One is only compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook if one also accepts the idea that earthly goods are not negligible in terms of the reasons they provide. To be clear, I mean things like: the pleasures of laughter, friendship, sex, families, etc., as well as achieving important life goals (including the goal of living a philosophical life in a tumultuous world.) I accept that these things are non-negligible and I feel confident that any theory of the Good Life must afford them a central place. I don't think I can provide a further justification for why I believe this, other than I find the thought compelling. If an interlocutor is happy to accept that these are all axiological ciphers because they are nothing when compared with the goodness of God in the next world, then I must part ways with him. I would, however, be surprised for a conservative to take that view, since conservatives, more than progressives, tend to value the familiar.

I am not sure I follow this last paragraph, but I take you to be saying that there are certain non-negligible goods that this life provides (friendship, etc.) and that anyone who accepts that there are must adopt a non-religious outlook. Your argument can perhaps be put as follows:

1. If a religion such as Christianity is true, then the good things of this world are relatively unimportant as compared with the good things of the world to come.

2. But it is not the case that the good things of this world are relatively unimportant: they are absolutely important.

Therefore

3. Someone of conservative bent, someone who is capable of appreciating what actually and presently exists, ought to reject a religion such as Christianity.

I would respond to this by saying that the goods of this world are certainly not absolutely important, but they are not "axiological ciphers" either. A theist will say that what exists in this world is good because it comes from the source of all goodness, God. So the conservative theist has plenty of reason to appreciate what actually and presently exists, but he is also in a position to evaluate the goodness of finite goods properly and without idolatry because he appreciates that they are other than that which is wholly good. The goods of this world are neither negligible nor absolute, neither illusory nor absolutely real.

I would further argue that atheists typically succumb to axiological illusion: they take what is relatively valuable for absolutely valuable.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

That article about political correctness in the universities you linked to reminded me of David Conway's comments in A Defence of the Realm about the 'systematic deracination' of the citizens of western liberal democracies since World War Two:

Through changes in educational curricula, plus other cultural changes, most notably in public broadcasting, the cultural majorities in these societies have been made increasingly unfamiliar with their national histories and traditions. Without adequate historical knowledge of their national histories and without encouragement and opportunity to participate in national traditions, the members of a society cannot be expected to have much understanding of or affection for them.

Solzhenitsyn put this chillingly: 'to destroy a people, you must first sever their roots'.Nothing is more important to remedying this than reclaiming education. Blogs like yours help. I teach English, and I try to do my bit by enunciating the following politically incorrect truths to all my classes. Like the author of the article you linked to, I'm frustrated by 'engagement with political presuppositions often quite peripheral at best — and more often directly opposed — to one’s own scholarly purposes', but the fact that it is necessary is a reminder that the spiritual reality that the scholar defends is vaster, richer and more profound than the narrow intellectual lists where he fights. The advantage of this list is that it frees one up to get on with the more important matter of showing why, for example, Shakespearean tragedy is worth reading. And it prevents one from assenting to falsehoods - to do which is to be complicit in evil.

I doubt you'll learn anything from it, but you might find it interesting anyway; the ones in red are, I think, the most politically incorrect.

The slave trade

The British weren’t the first to practise slavery, but they were the first to abolish it, first at home, then in the colonies, then throughout the world. Be proud of that.

More than three quarters of the captives sold to Europeans were provided by the Africans themselves from raids and war. The African powers remained in control of the slaves as long as the slave trade lasted. They entered into the slave trade entirely of their own accord. There was no opposition to slavery even in principle in black Africa. Western-style abolitionism had no impact: African chiefs sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of the slave trade because they found it so profitable.

Muslims were the greatest slave traders, enslaving seventeen-million people. There was never a Muslim abolitionist movement. The Koran assumes and accepts slavery.

Marxism

Communists murdered over one-hundred million people in the twentieth century.

Note how the Western intellectuals who criticise capitalist democracies vote with their feet by living in them, tellingly opting not to emigrate to North Korea or a Cuban prison state.

Sexism

Historically, nowhere in the world have women been better treated than in Christian nations. In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote the first tribute in history to an ordinary woman, his mother, Monica. The Divine Comedy is highest praise of a woman ever. According to Christianity, the Virgin Mary is the greatest human being ever to have lived. Be proud of that.

The accusers during the witch hunts were overwhelmingly women.

One-hundred and fifty years ago, ninety-five percent of men didn't have the vote.

In nineteenth-century England, more novels were published by women than by men. And they wrote under their own names, contrary to the feminist myth that women were obliged to take male names.

Western literature starts with an account of men fighting over a woman. Listen to Achilles: ‘Why must we battle Trojans, men of Argos? Why, why in the world if not for Helen with her loose and lustrous hair?’And Odysseus endures all perils and resists all temptations – even immortality – to get back home to his wife. Medieval chivalric literature also testifies to the fact that women were highly esteemed.

Homosexuality

Plato made sodomy illegal in his Laws.

Poets and orators did not express longings to return to their catamites.

Adult Athenians who acted as catamites were excluded from all offices in public life, not even being permitted to address the assembly.

Dead White Males

Most great literature is written by dead white males. Postmodernists think that’s explained by ‘oppression’ and ‘privilege’, but there are good reasons for it:

Whites have the highest IQ of any race (see the cold-climate theory of IQ).

Men are disproportionately represented at the extremes of intelligence (morons and geniuses): above the IQ level of 170, the genius level, there are thirty timesas many men as women. (Again, there are evolutionary reasons for this.)

Before writers are acknowledged to be great, their work must be subjected to the test of time, which outlasts any individual's lifespan.

Christianity

William E. Lecky, an atheist, makes the following point in his History of European Morals: ‘The vast change in the status of women must be manifest to all after Christianity had superseded the unlimited license of the pagan Empire.’ He mentions:

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The following is from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous but who wants me "to hear a different perspective on the matter than that of the Calvinists who comment on your blog: I don't want you thinking they are the ones rightly interpreting the Christian texts."

...................

Jesus and Paul had a rather liberal interpretation of the Old Testament Law, by which I mean a non-literal, moralist interpretation. I shall explain this in further detail by offering a few exemplary statements from them both.

Jesus famously said that "What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them" (Mt 15:11), specifying what he meant a few verses later: "But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts — murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person" (vv. 18-20). This is directly contradictory to the teaching of the Old Testament Law; after a long list of animals the eating of which is strictly forbidden, Lev 11:24 reads: "You will make yourselves unclean by [eating] these." Jesus denies the literal truth of Lev 11:24 by denying the reality of ritual purity and impurity; instead he gave a spiritualized, moralist interpretation of purity and impurity: the only true (im)purity or (un)cleanliness is moral (im)purity or (un)cleanliness.

A further expression of the denial of the reality of ritual purity and impurity and, implied with this, a rejection of the temple sacrificial system of worship is involved in Jesus' quoting the verse from Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." When the Pharisees see that Jesus eats at the same table as many tax collectors and sinners -- i.e., those who would render him ceremonially unclean and incapable of participating in the temple cult, thus removed from the blessings of God -- Jesus responds that God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Mt 9:10-13). "Sacrifice" is connected to a concern for ritual purity, as well as participation in the temple religious system; what God wants is not this, but mercy towards those who are in need of love: particularly those rejected by the religious figures and "holy men" of his time. God evidently is not concerned with ritual purity; he wishes that men be kind to one another, and he makes an effort to show such kindness himself through Jesus. But a rejection of ritual purity, the requirement for sacrifice, the legitimacy of the temple, etc., is a rejection of a literal reading of many Old Testament texts.

Consider also Jesus' and Paul's affirmation that the true fulfillment of the Law is obedience to the command "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (see, e.g., Mt 22:34-30; Rom 13:8-10, Gal 5:14). This cannot be literally true, for the various ritual and ceremonial injunctions of the Law (e.g., regarding circumcision, dietary habits, sacrifices, etc.) cannot in any plausible way be interpreted as mere instances of love for neighbor; no one would ever get the impression that the command to circumcise one's child on the eighth day is an instance of "love thy neighbor" by reading the relevant OT texts. What this statement suggests, rather, is a non-literal and moralist interpretation of the Old Testament: what is really of value is the moral teaching about loving your neighbor; all that ritual and ceremonial stuff doesn't mean much of anything and can even at times be ignored.

One more example would be Paul's affirmations regarding the ultimate insignificance of circumcision: "A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code" (Rom 2:28-29); "Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts" (1 Cor 7:19); "Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation" (Gal 6:15). No one would ever come to such a conclusion merely reading what the Old Testament says regarding the requirement of circumcision: "Every male among you shall be circumcised. . . . My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people" (Gen 17:10, 13-14). Paul elevates obedience to the moral commandments of God, especially "love thy neighbor", above the command of circumcision, so much so that the latter command is effectively annulled.

No one would come to the conclusions that Jesus and Paul did merely by reading the salient Old Testament texts themselves; their interpretation is non-literal and moralist, and is merely one manifestation of the tendency towards spritualized, internalized interpretations of inherited religion that appears in other places (e.g., ancient Greek religion with the advent of the philosophers) as well. (For more on this, see Stephen Finlan, The Background and Contents of Paul's Cultic Atonement Metaphors (Boston: Brill, 2004), 47ff.)

BV comments: I find the foregoing persuasive and would extract the following argument against inerrancy from it:

1. If the Scripture is inerrant, then no later passage revises, corrects, contradicts, annuls, or abrogates any earlier passage.

The argument is valid in point of logical form. If the first premise is not true, then I simply do not know what plenary inerrancy means. (I assume we mean by inerrancy plenary (full) inerrancy. Otherwise I could maintain that my blog is inerrant, provided you ignore all assertions in it that are mistaken. "It is everywhere inerrant except where it isn't.") The first premise is true and so is the second as the anon. contributor demonstrated. Therefore, the Scriptures are not inerrant.

ComBox open. But if you comment, be BRIEF and address PRECISELY WHAT IS CLAIMED by the anonymous contributor. Otherwise you will be unmercifully cast into the outer cyber-darkness where there is much weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

My last post drew a number of e-mail responses. Here is one, by Joshua Orsak. Subheadings added. The ComBox is open in case Professor Anderson, or anyone, cares to respond.

Purgatory

First I'd like to make a quick note on purgatory. Purgatory is found in the Apocrypha, the 10 or so books of the Bible found in the Septuagint, the Hellenized Jews' Scriptures and not in the Hebrew Scriptures. You find it in Tobit 12:9, 2 Maccabees 12:43-45 and Ecclesiasticus 3:30. Protestants don't accept these scriptures as divinely inspired, but the Catholic faiths (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic, etc) do. I don't want to expound TOO much on arguments for including the Apocrypha, but I want to say this. The Jews did not canonize their scriptures until around 90 AD. They did this, in part, because the Septuagint, in particular the books we call the Apocrypha, were being used against them by the Christians in debates over Jesus' place as messiah. Ironically, Protestants later excluded the books because they are not included in the Jewish' canon. Anderson's point about purgatory is confused. The issue is not whether purgatory is found in the Bible but which scriptures should be included in the Bible at all.

BV: Perhaps the point could be put like this: The question whether purgatory is to be found in the Bible is not a well-defined question, and is therefore unanswerable, until we decide which books are canonical. "You tell me which books make up the Bible, and I will tell whether there is Biblical support for a doctrine of purgatory."

Inerrancy

As to whether the Bible supports plenary inerrancy, in my opinion it does not do this consistently. The Bible is a collection of books that take a variety of positions on various theological issues. They are more like conversations around the Revelation of God to the Israelite people (and later the church) than the Revelation itself. The Bible is not the Revelation, but the record of The Revelation. Just to give an example, Jeremiah 28:7-9 modifies the conditions by which we test whether a prophet is genuine from an earlier set of conditions laid down in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. In the latter case we are told that a prophet is only a true prophet if his prophecy comes true. Jeremiah says that this is true only in the case of a prophet that prophecies peace. If a prophet gives you an oracle that you like, that is in line with what you want to hear, then his prophecy must come true or he was a false prophet. But Jeremiah insists that any prophet that challenges you or gives you a word of judgment, i.e., tells you what you do not want to hear, is a true prophet regardless of whether his prophecy comes true.

In the New Testament, the writers often quote passages out of context, and take them to mean something different than the original writers thought they meant. They take prophecies about the return from Babylon to Israel under Persian rule and talk about them as if they are messianic. This is not lying, from the writers' perspective. At the time the New Testament was written, it was believed that the truths behind scripture were hidden even to the original writers, and one needed the Spirit to guide one to dig into the hidden meaning behind the text. It is the Holy Spirit, and not scripture, that is primary in the New Testament, and it is guidance by the Spirit (rather than, say, the Pope) that gives credence to one's understanding of scripture. Jesus does this all the time in Matthew. He quotes scripture "you have heard it said" and then replaces or modifies it "but I say unto you...". Jesus has the authority to 'bind and loose' the law (to bind the law is to make it more strict, to loose it is to make it less strict, this was the pharisees' understanding of what a teacher was supposed to do). This authority derives from the Spirit. Just to give one example, think about Matthew 9:1-12. Jesus says that the allowance of divorce, found in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 did not derive from God but from Moses, clearly implying that not all of scripture comes from God alone. Jesus then goes to a rather ambiguous passage from Genesis to clarify what our attitude towards divorce should be.

The Danger of Bibliolatry

This is just the beginning of a sketch of a Biblical argument, but I'd say you are on firm BIBLICAL ground when you reject plenary inerrancy. There are certain passages that do seem to support that doctrine, but there are many, many more passages that indicate a vastly different way of approaching scripture. God should be the center of our theology, not a book. Experience and reason have to play a role. The Bible is not a constitution that restricts our limits our relationship with the Divine, it is rather a long and storied history of one people's (or two peoples') relationship with God and how God revealed Himself to them over an extended period of time. It includes their reflections on that revelation. It has a lot to say to us, and gives form and function to our own experience. Without it, we'd be starting pretty much from scratch. I love the Bible and it plays a central role in my relationship with God. But if it becomes the end-all be-all it becomes idolatrous in its own right. Bibliolatry is a subtle but I think very dangerous form of that terrible sin.

C. Scripture is a product of divine-human interaction. It exists contingently and does convey divine revelation. But it is not inerrant. It contains errors and defects that reflect the fact that it is a product of divine-human interaction. God may be an impeccable transmitter, but we are surely not impeccable receivers. There will be plenty of human 'noise' mixed in with the divine 'signal.' God is not the author of the Bible, various human beings are the authors, but some of these at some times are writing under inspiration and thus are drawing truths from a transcendent source. Although the Book contains divine revelation, it is not the Last Word. Nor is it impossible that divine revelation is to be found in such writings as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dhammapada, not to mention 'inspired' philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus.

Monday, July 02, 2012

James N. Anderson has a thought-provoking post entitled Ecclesial Activism. A key idea is that the Bible is to the Christian faith as the U. S. constitution is to the U. S. government. And just as judicial activism is a Bad Thing, so is ecclesial activism. The Roman Catholic Church comes in for a drubbing as the main engine of ecclesial activism:

If the Bible didn’t say something something that the bishops wanted it to say, or thought it should say, they could claim to “discover” new doctrines in the Bible — purgatory, indulgences, apostolic succession, papal infallibility, etc. — and no one would have power to overrule them.

Adapting the candid statement of Chief Justice Hughes, today’s Roman Catholic might well put it thus: “We are under the Bible, but the Bible is what the Pope says it is.” In fact, that’s exactly how things stand in practice. Functionally the Pope has become the highest governing authority in his church: higher even than the Bible. The church has been derailed by “ecclesial activism”.

I find it rather ironic then that in recent years a number of politically conservative evangelicals (J. Budziszewski, Francis Beckwith, and Jay Richards are three prominent examples) have swum the Tiber. Presumably they take a dim view of judicial activism. Shouldn’t they be equally averse to ecclesial activism?

When it comes to ecclesiology, Protestants are the true conservatives and the true constitutionalists.

Not being a theologian, I hesitate to comment on Anderson's post. But I'll make a couple of maverick comments. First, if a doctrine of purgatory cannot be found in the Bible, then I would consider that to be a lacuna in the Bible. The doctrine strikes me as not only extremely reasonable but also necessary: at death, almost none of us will be ready for the divine presence, and yet some us will not deserve hell. Therefore . . . .

On the topic of indulgences and papal infallibility, I too find these doctrines untenable if not absurd, but not so much because they cannot be found in the Bible -- assuming that is true -- but for philosophical reasons. The idea that there is an economy of salvation that can be quantified and regulated and administered is the rankest superstition.

So you see my bias: I don't understand sola scriptura and I reserve the right to think for myself. Question: Is the sola scriptura principle itself scripturally based? I apologize if that, to the cognoscenti, is a cheap-shot question.

It is worth noting in passing that it was his inability to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility that was the main cause of Franz Brentano's leaving of the Catholic priesthood, and later, the church. See here.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.

That's quite a shift. Typically, the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect. Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.

How specific?

The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.') The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. God, or rather God the Son, became man. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father. Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin. So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception. See Trinity and Incarnation and Original Sin categories for some details.

I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.

Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept. To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides. These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people. (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)

For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about. (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky. Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.) And so some of us become philosophers. But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .

But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies. Tomorrow's another day.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.

A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:

You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.

The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.

Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism. I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it. It should be obvious that while both are good -- the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life -- the second is better. The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality. In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert. One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.

Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts. The Christian answer is in the negative. As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation. Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death. The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity. Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts. One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood. How could faith alone suffice? Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference? As I understand the Catholic doctrine -- which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced -- there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.

As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity. But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.

And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation. The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief that is appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative!–don’t treat it as you would another historical narrative! Make a quite different place for it in your life.– There is nothing paradoxical about that!

The "nothing paradoxical" may be an allusion to Kierkegaard who is discussed in nearby 1937 entries. For Kierkegaard, it is is absurd that God should become man and die the death of a criminal, but this absurdity or paradox is precisely what the Christian believer must embrace. Wittgenstein appears to be rejecting this view, but also the view that S. K. also rejects, namely, that Christianity is grounded in verifiable historical facts such as that Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead.

I interpret Wittgenstein to be saying that Christianity is neither an absurd belief nor an historically grounded one. It is a groundless belief, but not groundless in the sense that it needs, but lacks, a ground, but in the sense that it is a framework belief that cannot, because it is a framework belief, have a ground and so cannot need one either. Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

But is it true?

When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the cynical, "What is truth?" Presumably, the Wittgensteinian fideist cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity. If it is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself.

Here is where the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me. No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life? And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games. But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel. What then is the difference between Christianity and chess? Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself. Christianity does so purport.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?

Our plesance here is all vain glory,This fals world is but transitory,The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;As with the wynd wavis the wicker,Wavis this wardlis vanitie;Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;They put me here because I was poor.The further in, the more you pay,But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be foundA lad to love you, girl, under the ground.Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're deadIt's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage inphilosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, itwould surely be strange for a man all through his life to desireonly death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

A major problem with Scholasticism is the innate desire that all men have to participate directly and ontologically in their God. We all want that real connection. Sudduth explains, “I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God”.

The fact is Van Tilism and Scholasticism, its Grandfather, can never give man real and ontological connection because like the fools they were, they tried to take the Ultimate Principle of Plotinus and the Pagans and somehow get a Christian worldview out of it with their theory of Absolute Divine Simplicity. This leaves only a pagan ecstatic trance state for Christian men to seek in their attempts to connect to their creator. Thus Sudduth, was in my opinion, simply following his monad back to its Pagan source. He is being consistent. Sudduth says, “I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.” Notice he doesn’t say, “through Lord Krishna” but “as” Lord Krishna. In Plotinus’ construction hierarchies of being emanated from the One which represent levels of composition , and at each hierarchy was an intermediary. In different versions of this metaphysical construction, the gods are intermediaries on this chain of being. As one move up the chain of being one becomes ontologically identified with the intermediary. Sudduth says, “Since this time I have experienced Krishna’s presence in the air, mountains, ocean, trees, cows, and equally within myself. I experience Him in the outer and inner worlds, and my heart is regularly filled with serenity and bliss.” You see on his view, God is in the state of mind not the proposition.

In conclusion, I commend Sudduth for his logical consistency. When will the rest of the Scholastic Reformed have the courage to do the same? My Scholastic reader, Sudduth is taking Absolute Divine Simplicity to its logical end. I have two options for you.

1. Follow Sudduth

2. Leave Scholastic Neoplatonism for Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism: An absolute Triad: Three ontologically distinct persons; three distinct complex-non-simple eternal divine minds who find their hypostatic origin in the person of the Father.

I'd love to comment, but I have a dentist appointment. Man does not live by bread alone, but without bread and the properly maintained tools of mastication, no philosophy gets done, leastways, not here below.

Afternoon Update: I now have time to hazard some brief and off-the-cuff bloggity-blog commentary.

Earlier in the post, the author writes, "Once someone believes that truth and God cannot be found in a proposition, but in a psychological state, truth by definition becomes something subjective and arbitrary." The full flavor of this no doubt escapes me since I haven't read Van Til or Gordon Clark. Not that surprising given my background, which is Roman Catholic, though as 'Maverick Philosopher' suggests, I aim to follow the arguments where they lead, roaming over the intellectual landscape bare of a brand, and free of institutional tie-downs and dogmatic ballast. The lack of the latter may cause my vessel to capsize, but it's a risk I knowingly run.

But speaking for myself, and not for Sudduth, though I expect he will agree with me, I do not understand how anyone could think that the ultimate truth or God (who is arguably the ultimate truth) could be found in a proposition or a body of propositions. Doctrine surely cannot be of paramount importance in religion. That is a bare assertion, so far, and on this occasion I cannot do much to support it. But I should think that doctrine is but a "necessary makeshift" (to borrow a phrase from F. H. Bradley) to help us in our "Ascent to the Absolute" (to borrow the title of a book by my teacher J. N. Findlay). The name-dropping gives me away and indicates that I nail my colors to the mast of experience in religion over doctrine. (Practice is also important, but that's a separate topic.)

Thoughts lead to thoughts and more thoughts and never beyond the circle of thoughts. But I should like to experience the THINKER behind the thoughts, which thinker can no doubt be thought about but can never be reduced to a thought or proposition. Philosophy operates on the discursive plane, cannot do otherwise, and so is limited, which is why we need religion which in my view, and perhaps in Sudduths', is completed in mystical experience.

The path to the ultimate subject that cannot be objectified, but is both transcendentally and ontologically the condition of all objectivity, is an inner path. I needn't leave my own tradition and make the journey to the East to find support. I find it in Augustine: Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas . "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority." The way to God is through the self. The way is not by way of propositions or thoughts or doctrines, and certainly not by fighting over doctrines or condemning the other guy to hell for holding a different doctrine, or a doctrine that plays down the importance of doctrine.

The ultimate truth is not propositional truth, which is merely representational, nor the ontic true of things represented, but the ontological truth of God. (This tripartition can be found in both Heidegger and in Thomas.) Now if I find God, but not "in a proposition," but by experience (in fitful glimpses as if through a glass darkly here below, in the visio beata yonder) does it follow that that I have merely realized "an arbitrary and subjective psychological state"? That is a false alternative. Not that I wish to deny that some mystical experiences are nonveridical and misleading. Humans are subject to deception and self-deception in all areas of life.

There is also the matter of the divine simplicity. Here I will just baldly state that a God worthy of worship must be an absolute, and that no decent absolute can be anything other than ontologically simple. For more, I refer you to my Stanford Encylopedia article and the divine simplicity category of this weblog.

This is hotly contested, of course. Athens and Jerusalem are in tension, and you can see that my ties to Athens -- and to Benares! -- are strong and unbreakable. There are deep, deep issues here. I am not a master of them; they master me. One issue has to do with the role of reason and the power of reason. While confessing reason's infirmity, as I have on many occasions in these pages, I must also admit that it is a god-like faculty in us and part of what the imago Dei must consist in -- and this despite what I have said about the discursive path being non-ultimate.

I grant that the Fall has (not just had) noetic consequences: our reason is weaker than it would be in a prelapsarian state. But we need it to protect us from blind dogmatism, fundamentalism and the forms of idolatry and superstition that reside within religion herself such as bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry.

We should not paper over the deep tensions within Christianity but live them in the hope that an honest confrontation with them will lead to deeper insight.

And a little Christian charity can't be a bad idea either, especially towards such 'apostates' as Michael Sudduth.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Many Catholic artifacts related to worship are marked with the Roman letters IHS, which is a partial Latin transliteration of the Greek form of 'Jesus' and can also be read as an acronym for the Latin Iesus Hominum Salvator (Jesus Savior of Man). However, some have construed the IHS to be an acronym for "In this Sign", as in "In this sign you shall conquer." Some who were desirous of defending the judgements of the Obama administration used that last and incorrect notion to justify covering all of the IHS images at Georgetown University two years ago on the ground that Muslims would see the IHS as a symbol of Christian aggression. My reaction to that claim is that the event presented the U.S. government with what educators now call a "teachable moment." The only problem being, I suspect, that no one in the White House gang actually knew the true meaning of the letters and probably shared the Muslim belief that the Crusades were wars of aggression aimed at forcefully converting the peace-loving Muslims and enriching the pope.

Although it is true that 'IHS' is, as Tom writes, "a partial Latin transliteration of of the Greek form of 'Jesus'," it is not true that it abbreviates Iesus Hominum Salvator, at least according to the Catholic Encyclopedia: "IHS was sometimes wrongly understood as "Jesus Hominum (or Hierosolymae) Salvator", i.e. Jesus, the Saviour of men (or of Jerusalem=Hierosolyma)."

Being a pedant and a quibbler (but in the very best senses of these terms!), I was all set to quibble with Monterey Tom's use of 'acronym' in connection with 'IHS.' After all, you cannot pronounce it like a word in the way you can pronounce 'laser' and 'Gestapo' which are clearly acronyms. But it all depends on how exactly we define 'acronym,' a question I'm not in the mood for. The Wikipedia article looks good, however. I am tempted to say that, while every acronym is an abbreviation, not every abbreviation is an acronym. 'IHS' is an abbreviation.

Acronym or not, 'IHS' is a Christogram, and sometimes a monogram. As it just now occurred in my text, 'IHS' is not a monogram but a mere abbreviation. But again it depends on what exactly a monogram is. According to the Wikipedia monogram article, "A monogram is a motif made by overlapping or combining two or more letters or other graphemes to form one symbol." Clear examples:

In the first monogram one can discern alpha, omega, chi, and rho. The 'chi' as I said last post is the 'X' is 'Xmas.'

From pedantry to political correctness and a bit of anti-Pee Cee polemic. To think that 'IHS' abbreviates In hoc signes vincit shows a contemptible degree of ignorance, but what is worse is to worry about a possible Muslim misreading of the abbreviation. Only a namby-pamby Pee-Cee dumbass liberal could sink to that level. That is down there with the supine foolishness of those librul handwringers who wailed, in the wake of 9/11, "What did we do to offend them?"

﻿As for Georgetown's caving to the White House demand, that is contemptible and disgusting, but so typical. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, there is no one so spineless in all the world as a university administrator. They should have said loud and clear "Absolutely not!"

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

This infamous phrase of Hillaire Belloc is here explained by James V. Schall. Excerpt:

Modern science itself has medieval Christian origins. Without the notion of a real world, itself not God, worth investigating together with the notion of real secondary causes, no science would be possible. Those societies that embraced a voluntarist origin of things never developed science because one cannot investigate what can constantly be otherwise.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':

In a recent post you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example.)"

Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic. I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think would be useful.

This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism. (This clarification may be spread over a few posts.) I was brought up Catholic and attended Catholic schools, starting in the pre-Vatican II days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it is now. Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed off the training and the trappings as soon as they could. For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with. Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition. Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root. Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences. Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values. For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s, led to radical questioning. For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong. The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite. For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism. For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.

And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on theone hand, and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other. The sex bit was just one example. The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true. Truth matters! As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited. This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.

It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition. It is a tension that cannot be resolved by eliminationof one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?

The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.

So am I a Catholic or not? Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a sociological sense. But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism. He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.' He will find it impossible not to ask questions. His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true. Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons? Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine?

I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists. Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of ideology. 'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth. An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must. So believe we must, in something or other. Religions are ideologies in this sense. But philosophy is not ideological. For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.

I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them. The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.' The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one. Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation. And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation. That should gve one pause. If it doesn't, then I suggest you are insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with your own doxastic security. Why do I need a church at all? And why this one? Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of Protestantism?

Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith. They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of the teachings on faith and morals.

They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions. Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth. If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is. They don't. But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils. The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day. You say Augustine was inspired by the Holy Spirit? That is a claim you are making. How validate it? Why don't the Protestants agree with you? Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?

This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging. This may turn out to be a long series of posts.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas. There are others as well. Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas.

1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction. When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented (6 January 2005):

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. [. . .] It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me.

And then there is that other Australian, the neo-positivist David Stove, who thinks that something has gone dreadfully and fatally wrong with the thoughts of anyone who takes Trinitarian speculation seriously, in particular the debate over the filioque clause. See The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Backwell, 1991, p. 179.

2. They are false and/or incoherent, but worthy of study as concrete points of entry into various logical, metaphysical, and ethical questions that are salient for all, including atheists and materialists. What is identity? Is it absolute or sortal-relative? What is personhood? Can guilt be inherited? Scores of such questions arise when these dogmas are carefully thought through.

3. They are false and/or incoherent but worth studying as part of the history of ideas, or the sociology of knowledge, or the psychology of belief. Ideas have consequences, whether true or false, coherent or incoherent, sane or insane.

4. The are false and/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable. An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

5. The dogmas are coherent and indeed true as formulated and promulgated by some particular church such as the Roman Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox church.

I reject the extremes of this spectrum of opinion. Thus I reject #1 and #5. My approach is closest to #4, though I feel no particular commitment to the Kantian variant. Although the main reason to take seriously Original Sin, for example, is that it expresses something deep and true about the human predicament, the reasons supplied in #2 and #3 are also good ones. The notion that blacks are owed reparations for slavery, for example, is one that is closely related to the notion that guilt is transmissible from the perpetrator of a crime to his descendants. This gives rise to the suspicion that the demand for reparations is a secularization of certain Christian dogmatic themes. How then can the evaluation of the reparations demand proceed without any consideration of the theological doctrine?

Monday, September 26, 2011

1. Let's start with the word 'mortal' and remind ourselves of some obvious points. 'Mortal' is from the Latin mors, mortis meaning death. That which is mortal is either subject to death, or conducive to death, or in some way expressive of death. Thus when we say of a human being that he is mortal we do not mean that he is dead, but that he is subject to death. My being mortal is consistent with my being alive and kicking. Indeed, if I weren't alive I could not be said to be either mortal or immortal. Spark plugs are neither mortal nor immortal. Some will say of a car that it has 'died.' But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking. Only that which was once alive can properly be said to have died.

We also apply 'mortal' to wounds and sins. A mortal wound is not one that is subject to death but one that has a high probability of causing the death of the body of the one whose wound it is. A mortal as opposed to a venial sin is one that is conducive to the death of the soul in the sense of the separation of the soul from its ultimate good, God. Thomas Nagel has a collection of essays entitled Mortal Questions. These questions are neither subject to death nor conducive to death, but they are questions raised by mortals especially insofar as they are mortal. Thus the first essay in the collection is appropriately entitled "Death." And an excellent essay it is.

2. Although 'mortal' applies to all living things, what interests us particularly is 'mortal' as a predicate of human beings. To be mortal in this sense is to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.

WEAK sense: X is mortal =df X is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.

STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own, is going to die, will die in the normal course of events. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.

Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':

STRONG sense: X is immortal =df X is not able to die.

WEAK sense: X is immortal =df X is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from X.

3. Let's run through some cases to illustrate the distinction. God is not mortal in either the weak or the strong sense. It is built into the divine nature (essence) that he cannot die. 'God is dead,' taken literally is nonsense. (Of course, that is not the way Nietzsche intended it to be taken; he was making a cultural point.) God is a necessary being, a being that exists in all possible worlds and at all times in those worlds containing time.

Your humble correspondent is mortal in both senses. Not only can I die, I must die, I cannot do anything to avoid eventually dying: I am subject to the necessitas moriendi. Cryogenics won't help for reasons I won't belabor at the moment. It is worth noting that, according to Christian doctrine, my having-to-die is a contingent attribute of me unlike my being-able-to-die. My having-to-die is punishment for original sin and is as contingent as that sin. My being-able-to-die, however, is grounded in my nature as a soul-body composite, and I am essentially such a composite. Thus it is not my nature to be immortal (in the strong sense), whence it follows that if I achieve immortality (in the weak sense) it is due to a supernatural gift: God freely grants me immortality; I don't have it apart from free divine donation. In this sense I am not naturally immortal: I am not immortal in virtue of my nature or essence the way God is.

Prelapsarian human beings are mortal in the WEAK sense but not in the STRONG. Unlike God, there is nothing in the nature (essence) of such beings to prevent them from dying if they should will to die. But if they do not will to die, God grants them unending life. Postlapsarian human beings, however, are mortal in both the weak and the strong senses.

4. Now what about Jesus Christ? He is one person in two natures; fully man and fully God. But all men are mortal in the weak sense: they can die. So Christ is mortal in the weak sense. But he is not mortal in the strong sense: he is not subject to the necessitas moriendi. He freely chose his death.

So is Christ a counterexample to 'All men are mortal'? It depends on what is meant by 'mortal.' Taken in the weak sense, Christ is not; taken in the strong sense, he is.

5. But there is still a Christological problem that wants solving. If Jesus Christ is God (or, to be precise, the Second Person of the Trinity), then JC is strongly immortal. But if JC is fully human, then he is not strongly immortal, but weakly immortal. How can one and the same person have contradictory attributes?

Saturday, September 17, 2011

1. An important distinction for understanding the doctrine of original sin is that between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum). This post will explain the distinction and then consider Immanuel Kant's reasons for rejecting originated original sin. It is important to realize that Kant does accept something like original sin under the rubric 'radical evil,' a topic to be explored in subsequent posts. It is also important to realize that Kierkegaard's seminal thoughts about original sin as expressed in The Concept of Dread were influenced by Kant, and that Reinhold Niebuhr's influential treatment is in turn derivative from Kierkegaard.

2. So what's the distinction? According to the Genesis story, the Fall of Man was precipitated by specific sinful acts, acts of disobedience, by Adam and Eve. The sins of Adam and Eve were originating original sins. They were the first sins for the first human beings, but also the first sins for the human race. Their sin somehow got transmitted to their descendants inducing in them a state of sinfulness. The sinfulness of the descendants is originated original sin. This originated original sin is hereitary sin: it is inherited and innate for postlapsarians and so does not depend on any specific sin of a person who inherits it. Nevertheless it brings with it guilt and desert of punishment. Socrates, then, or any post-Adamic man, is guilty and deserving of punishment whether or not he commits any actual sins of his own. And so a man who was perfectly sinless in the sense that he committed no actual sin of his own would nonetheless stand condemned in virtue of what an earlier man had one. This doctrine has the consequence that an infant, who as an infant is of course innocent of any actual sin, and who dies unbaptized, is justly excluded from the kingdom of heaven. Such an infant, on Catholic doctrine at least, ends up in limbo, or to be precise, in limbus infantium. A cognate consequence is that a perfectly sinless adult who lives and dies before Christ's redemptive act is also excluded from heaven. Such a person lands in limbus patrum. (See here for the Catholic doctrine.)

3. The stumbling block is obvious: How can one justly be held morally accountable for what someone else has done or left undone? How can one be guilty and deserving of punishment without having committed any specific transgression? How can guilt be inherited? Aren't these moral absurdities? Aren't we morally distinct as persons, each responsible only for what he does and leaves undone? There might well be originating original sin, but how could there be originated original sin? It is worth noting that to reject originated original sin is not to reject originating original sin, or original sin as such. There could be a deep structural flaw in humans as humans, universal and unameliorable by human effort, which deserves the title 'original sin/sinfulness' without it being the case that sin is inheritable.

Again I revert to my distinction between the putative fact of our fallenness and the various theories about it. To refute a theory is not to refute a fact.

4. Kant rejects the Augustinian notion of inherited sin. Sinfulness, guilt, desert of punishment -- these cannot be inherited. So for Kant there is no originated original sin. Of the various explanations of the spread of moral evil through the members and generations of the human race, "the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene and Hudson, Harper 1960, p. 35) But this is not to say that Kant rejects the notion of original sin. He himself speaks of peccatum originarium, which he distinguishes from peccatum derivatum. (26) For Kant, original sin is a propensity in us toward moral evil which is universal and logically prior to specific immoral acts. I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

5. But what is Kant's argument against hereditary guilt and originated original sin? Kant as I read him accepts it as a fact that in all human beings there is radical moral evil, a peccatum originarium that lies deeper than, and makes possible, specific peccata derivata. What he objects to is the explanation of this fact in terms of a propagation of guilt from the original parents. The main point is that a temporal explanation in terms of antecedent causes cannot account for something for which we are morally responsible. If we are morally responsible, then we are free; but free actions cannot be explained in terms of temporally prior causes. For if an action is caused, it is necessitated, and what is necessitated by its causes cannot be free.

What is true of actions is true of moral character insofar as moral character is something for which one is morally responsible. Therefore our radically evil moral character which predisposes us to specific acts of wrongdoing cannot be explained in terms of temporally antececent causes. Hence it cannot be explained by any propagation of guilt from the original parents to us. Thus there is no originated guilt. Our being guilty must be viewed "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." (36) Thus all actions which make us guilty are original employments of the will. All original sin is originating original sin.

Perhaps we can put it this way. Adam has nothing over Socrates. It is not as if Adam went directly from a state of innocence into a state of sin while Socrates inherited sinfulness and was never in a state of innocence. If there is such a thing as original sin then both are equally originative of it.

The Genesis account gives us a temporal representation of a logical and thus atemporal relationship. The state of innocence is set at the temporal beginning of humanity, and the fall from innocence is depicted as an event in time. But then we get the problems raised in #3 above. The mistake is to "look for an origin in time of a moral character for which we are to be held responsible . . . ." (38) We make this mistake because we want an explanation of the contingent existence of our radically evil moral predisposition. An explanation, however, is not to be had. The rational origin of the perversion of our will "remains inscrutable to us." (38)

6. Kant thus does accept something like original sin. We have within us a deep propensity to moral evil that makes us guilty and deserving of punishment. But there is no deterministic causal explanation for it. So while there is a sense in which our fallenness is innate, it is not inherited. For it is morally absurd to suppose that I could be guilty of being in a state that I am caused to be in. Each one of us is originally guilty but by a free atemporal choice. This makes the presence of the radical flaw in each of us inscrutable and inexplicable. The mystery of radical evil points us to the mystery of free will. On Kant's view, then, there is only originating original sin. Each of us by his own free noumenal agency plunges from innocence into guilt!

We shall have to continue these ruminations later. Some questions on the menu of rumination:

Q1. Is Kant's account with its appeal to atemporal noumenal agency really any better than Augustine's biological propagation account?

Q2. How can guilt be innate but not inherited, as Kant maintains?

Q3. Why believe in radical evil in the first place? If the evidence for it is empirical, how can such evidence show that radical evil is both universal (and thus inscribed in man's very nature) and ineradicable by human effort?

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

You will be forgiven (by me, anyway) for finding the doctrine of Original Sin (OS) in its Augustinian form absurd. For it seems to entail a logical contradiction. The originality of OS seems to conflict with its sinfulnness.

To start with the sinfulness part. If my having done (or having failed to do) X is a sin, then my having done (or having failed to do) X is something for which I am morally responsible. But I am morally responsible for an act or omission only if I could have done otherwise. But if I could have done otherwise, then it cannot be essential to me (part of my nature as a human being) that I sin (or be in a sinful condition, or be guilty). Whatever guilt accrued to someone in the past (Adam or anyone else) in virtue of his misdeeds is his affair alone and is not chargeable to my moral bank account.

To put it anachronistically, there was a Kantian follower of Pelagius by the name of Coelestius who maintained that man cannot be held responsible for keeping a law or achieving an ideal if he lacks the capacity to do so. As Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941, p. 247) writes:

Thus the Kantian "I ought therefore I can" is neatly anticipated in the argument of Coelestius: "We have to inquire whether whether a man is commanded to be without sin; for either he is unable so to live and then there is no such commandment; or else if there be such a commandment he has the ability."

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as original sin, then sinfulness is essential to me, 'inscribed into my very essence' as a French writer might put it. For original sin is not the sin of Adam and Eve only, but the sin of all of us. Adam is just as much Man as a man; Eve is just as much Woman as a woman. We are all guilty of original sin.

And so OS seems to entail that sinfulness both is and is not essential to me. And that is a contradiction.

We might essay a Pelagian escape route by modifying our understanding of the doctrine in the following way. OS is not, strictly speaking, a sin but refers to a sort of structural flaw or weakness, one to be found in each and every human being, which predisposes us to actual sin but is not itself a sin or a state of sinfulness for a postlapsarian man or woman. This predisposition might be ascribed to the hebetude of the flesh or the inertia of nature. Whatever its source, it is not in our power. Hence we are not responsible for it and not guilty in virtue of it. It does not interfere with our free will or make impossible self-perfection. There is no inherited guilt. Perhaps the structural flaw under which we all labor is the result of someone's sin in the past; but if it is we are not morally responsible for it.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

I want to give you a heads up on the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". The phrase is probably an idiom that means something like 'universal wisdom' or 'all knowledge'. A better translation may be 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Everything From A to Z'. There is, in fact, nothing in the story that indicates that Adam and Eve had no free will before the eating of the fruit. God, in fact, gives them orders that presuppose the freedom to disobey...to tend the garden, to refrain from eating some fruit, etc. The eating of the Tree was literally to eat of the fruit that gives one the wisdom of God, to overcome the limits God had placed on them and become more like Him. And the result is the clothing of the self, and later the tilling of soil and animal husbandry and after Cain the building of cities. It is not 'moral' knowledge they are coming to but the knowledge of what it takes to enact their own wills to 'get what they want...things like technology and the building of cities.

Peace and Blessings,Joshua Orsak

1. The crux of the matter is indeed the interpretation of 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' So one question for Mr Orsak is how he would support his interpretation. After all, the phrase speaks of the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of all things.

2. In yesterday's post I did not say that Adam and Eve did not have freedom of the will before eating the forbidden fruit; I said that they were not moral agents before eating it. I specified two individually necessary conditions of moral agency (and I left open the question whether they are jointly sufficient). The one is free will and the other is knowledge of the difference between good and evil. Since both conditions are necessary, absence of either prevents a being from being a moral agent. So what I was arguing is consistent with Adam's and Eve's possession of free will prior to their eating of the forbidden fruit.

3. The point I was making (and I got this from Peter Lupu, to give credit where credit is due) was that there is something prima facie puzzling about Genesis 2 & 3. Roughly: How can God justly banish Adam and Eve from paradise for disobedience prior to their knowing the difference between good and evil?

4. Orsak's solution is to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers all knowledge. I agree that if this interpretation is defensible, then the puzzle collapses. But what considerations speak for Orsak's interpretation? After all, the most natural way to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is to interpret it as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers either (i) the knowledge that there is an objective difference between good and evil, or (ii) the knowledge of which actions/omissions are good and which evil, or (iii) both.

Monday, September 05, 2011

At Genesis 2,17 the Lord forbids Adam from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death. In the next chapter, however, Eve is tempted by the serpent, succumbs, eats of the tree, and persuades Adam to eat of it too. As punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden and put under sentence of death. Thus mortality is one of the wages of Original Sin.

The story has a puzzling feature that Peter Lupu made me see. Let us agree that a moral agent is a being that (i) possesses free will, and (ii) possesses knowledge of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. Clearly, both conditions are necessary for moral agency. And let us agree that no agent can be justly punished unless he is a moral agent and does something wrong. But before eating from the tree, Adam and Eve are not moral agents. For it is only by eating from the tree that they acquire the knowledge of good and evil, one of the necessary conditions of moral agency. And yet God punishes them. How then can his punishment be just? My problem concerns not the truth of the story, but its coherence and meaning. The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. If God punishes, God punishes justly.2. If God punishes an agent justly, then that agent is a moral agent that deliberately does something wrong.3. A moral agent possesses the knowledge of good and evil.4. God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.5. Adam and Eve did not possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

The pentad is logically inconsistent: the first four limbs entail the negation of the fifth. To rescue the coherence of the story one of the limbs must be rejected. But which one?

(1), (3), and (4) are undeniable. This leaves (2) and (5). One might think to deny (2). My dog is not a moral agent, but I can justly punish it for some behavior. But punishment in this sense is mere behavior-modification and not relevant to the case at hand. So it appears that the only way out is by denying (5). Adam and Eve did possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit. If so, the so-called 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is not a tree the eating of the fruit of which is necessary for becoming a moral agent.

Support for this way out can be found at Genesis 1, 26: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness . . . ." This image, I argue, is a spiritual image. You would have to be quite the lunkheaded atheist/materialist to think that the image is a physical one. Now if God created man in his spiritual image, then presumably that means that God created man to be a moral agent, a free being who is alive to the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. So before receiving the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve were already moral agents. On this interpretation, whereby (5) is rejected, the coherence of the story is upheld.

"But then why is the tree in question called 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?" I have no idea.

Another intriguing suggestion that Peter Lupu made to me in conversation was that the Genesis story recounts not the Fall of man, but his rise or ascent from a pre-human condition of animal innocence to the status of a moral being possessing the knowledge of good and evil. This makes sense if if it is by eating the forbidden fruit that man first become man in the full theomorphic sense. And so, to put it quite pointedly, it is only by disobeying the divine command that Adam becomes a son of God! Before that he wallows in a state of animal-like, pre-human inocence. Now surely a God worth his salt would not want mere pets; what he would want are sons and daughters capable of participating in the divine life. He wants his 'children' to be moral agents. Indeed, one might go so far as to suppose -- and this I think is the direction in which Peter is headed -- that God wants them to be autonomous moral agents, agents who are not merely (libertarianly) free, and awake to the distinction between good and evil, but who in addition are morally self-legislative, i.e., who give the law to themselves, as opposed to existing heteronomously in a condition where the law is imposed on them by God.

The trajectory of this interpretation is towards secular humanism. God fades out and Man comes into his own. I don't buy it, but that's another post.

Saturday, September 03, 2011

One mistake is to think that the doctrine of Original Sin is empirically verifiable. I have seen this thought attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. (If someone can supply a reference for me with exact bibliographical data, I would be much obliged.) I could easily be mistaken, but I believe I have encountered the thought in Kierkegaard as well. (Anyone have a reference?) G. K. Chesterton says essentially the same thing. See my post, Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined. Chesterton thinks that sin, and indeed original sin, is a plain fact for all to see. That is simply not the case as I argue.

The opposite mistake is to think that Original Sin is obviously false and empirically refutable by evolutionary biology. Thus: no Fall because no original biologically human parents. As if the doctrine of the Fall 'stands or falls' with the truth of a passage in Genesis literally interpreted. I lately explained why I think that is a mistake, and indeed a rather stupid one, though my explanation left something to be desired. (I am working on a longer post on the Fall as we speak.)

So on the one hand we have those who maintain that the doctrine of Original Sin is true as a matter of empirical fact, and on the other we have those who maintain that it is false as a matter of empirical fact. On both sides we find very intelligent people. I take this disagreement as further evidence that we are indeed fallen beings, 'noetically wretched,' to coin a phrase, beings whose reason is so infirm and befouled that we can even argue about such a thing. And of course my own view, according to which OS is neither empirically true nor empirically false, is just another voice added to the cacophony of conflicting voices, though, as it seems to me, it has more merit than the other two.

So we are in deep caca, intellectually, morally, and in every which way -- which is why I believe in 'something like' Original Sin. Our condition is a fallen one, and indeed one that is (i) universal in that it applies to everyone, and (ii) unameliorable by anything we can do, individually or collectively. You say I need to justify these bold claims? I agree! But it's Saturday night, the sun is setting, and it's time to close up shop for the day. So, invoking the blogospheric privilege deriving from the truth that brevity is the soul of blog, I simply punch the clock.